They knew I was a hustler around town, a kid on the street . . .

Wally Stokes, 76, was a meat cutter most of his life and ran his own grocery store in Simi Valley until he retired. He first learned to make money as a youngster in a small Oklahoma town. Stokes is widowed and lives in Simi Valley.

When I was a kid, I grew up in oil- boomin’ towns. My dad wasn’t an oil-field worker. He was more or less a barber. He would set up a barber shop, and then in the back they would have gambling or a pool hall and a bar. My father carried two pistols on his hips.

The last place we had was in Slick, Okla. When a boom started, the gambling halls and houses of prostitutes would open up to get the oil-field workers’ money. These gals would stay in their rooms most all day. I learned pretty early you could knock on the door and say, “Mabel, you need me to get something for you?” I’d look up at her with big wistful eyes. “Oh, get me a piece of ice, Wally,” or “Go to the drug store and get me a package of cigarettes.” They always gave me a silver dollar. As a kid I’d be making 40 or 50 dollars some days. I was making more money than the oil-field workers were making.

Nobody said anything if a 10-year-old kid went in and played the slot machine. They knew I was a hustler around town, a kid on the street, a latchkey kid. After my father had a stroke, he was paralyzed, and my mother went up to Tulsa to stay with him. She just more or less left my oldest brother and me to wander around town. We had the house to live in, but we had to hustle food. I guess she knew we could do it. I was about 10 years old, my brother was 12. I learned pretty early how to get along in a boom town.

After the town began to dry up, I used to get up early in the morning and go downtown and deliver my papers. I’d deliver you a paper for 18 cents a week. I’d go down the alley and pick up these jake bottles, that’s what they sold Jamaica Ginger in. It was about 30 or 40% alcohol. Two ounces of it would set you on your rear. I used to pick up the bottles and get 10 cents apiece.

I’d go to the dance, they called it the skinners’ ball, and I’d look at a guy and watch where he’d hide his whiskey under the table. Then I’d go steal it. I knew he was out of whiskey so I’d hit him up in the dance hall and sell him his own whiskey. I’d put it in a different bottle. I’d do anything to make a dollar.

I didn’t think I was a mean kid. I thought I was a good kid. I was just mischievous, a little bit. I guess that’s what you’d call it.

After that I left home and got on freight trains and just knocked around over the country. I didn’t know where I was going or when I would get there. I always could get someone to give me something to eat.

One night up in the mountains in Colorado I got in a gondola. It’s about half as big as a boxcar, but it doesn’t have a roof on it. It started to snow, and the train was moving, so we couldn’t get off. If it hadn’t been for this boy with me, I would have frozen to death. I just wanted to lay down and go to sleep, but he kept pushing me. We ran around that gondola in the snow all night long until we got into the railroad yards the next day. We got in a switch engine that they had all fired up and sat there all day and thawed out.

I had a lot of fun knocking around. Now I can laugh, but I can remember one time I was laying in a culvert under a railroad track sleeping with spiders and rats and everything crawling around there, and I got to crying. I was about 13 or 14. I thought, “I bet if my grandfather and grandmother were alive they wouldn’t let me do this.” After they died, I didn’t have anybody. My father was paralyzed, and my mother was trying to make a living. She worked day and night. They did the best they could.

They had a hard life back in those days but you didn’t know it because everybody else had a hard life. You didn’t turn on the TV and see Rich and Famous and all that garbage. It makes me sick sometimes because I think of 40,000 people homeless down there in L.A. and this guy’s got billions of dollars and I say to myself, “The world isn’t set up right.”